Shared Genius August 2014 Edition

Shared Genius Practice Solutions From one genius to another.
August 2014 support special includes:
THOMAS date tricks, billed claims, and more!

Available now!

It Takes a Billing Class to Train Some Geniuses

PR Henriksen, the character

You might not know this but here at Genius Solutions the vast majority of our software support staff and all of our trainers have worked in various healthcare settings:  offices, hospitals, support staff, billers, office managers, multiple office managers, and more.  Basically our Genius support is made up of practical medical office specialists, software geeks, and hardware tech specialists who are hardware, networking, and software geeks.  There is a lot, and quite a variety, of expert knowledge on call, for your calls.

Me? I started at Genius in support, as part of the software geek zone (with some generally nerdy hardware tendencies).

Transparency and Leaving Doctors’ Data Hanging out in the Breeze

The Sunshine Act was passed as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (health care reform) in 2010, but CMS decided to delay data collection in connection with the act until 2013.  The Act was designed to give transparency to the money and dealings between physicians, pharmaceutical companies, medical device and other medical supply manufacturers, as well as ownership or investment interests in group purchasing organizations.  Physicians and manufacturers are to report (or disclose) any and all such incentives and payments they receive to CMS.  Payments need to be reported by date and amount as well as list the nature of the payment or incentive (i.e. gifts, meals, speaking honoraria, etc). 

The thought was that if these little promos, pluses, gifts, and payments were known, it would cut down on things like drugs being dispensed because doctors got good gifts and perks, rather than prescribing what would be best for their patients or possibly lying about results or usage for drug reporting purposes.  That’s not giving doctors very much credit in my book. 

Finally! CMS Announces New ICD-10 "GO" Date

FINALLY!  CMS announces ICD-10 "GO" date IS now October 1st, 2015!

Interesting, the article doesn't note anything about a comment period, it simply says, this is the date.  I guess nothing but bumping the date ahead, might not need an additional comment period as it had been done before.

So, what are you doing now to prepare?